Why teens are rebelling against Facebook

Twitter has fared better at holding on to younger users

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may be the biggest social network on the planet with 1 billion-plus users, but it’s not beating Twitter in every way. Twitter increasingly skews toward younger users, new research finds.

Teens are leaving bigger social networks for the privacy of messaging apps, but experts say Twitter is managing to hold on to more of this sought-after younger demographic than its bigger rival. The percentage of teens active on Facebook dropped by 9% during 2013 and by 7% on YouTube, according to a global survey of over 40,000 Internet users by research firm GlobalWebIndex — but only fell by 3% on Twitter. Twitter is also the preferred social network by 27% of adolescents versus 23% for Facebook, according to the “Spring 2014” survey of 7,500 U.S. teens by Piper Jaffray; in Spring 2013, Facebook beat Twitter by 33% to 30%. (Facebook declined to comment.)

“Twitter still has the cool factor,” says Daniel Miller, a professor of anthropology at University College London who is currently studying students’ use of social networks. Teens use Facebook to send party invites and communicate with their families, but they mostly use Twitter to communicate with each other, he says. “This has no relation to what you and I know about Twitter,” Miller adds. They use it for instant messaging, posting images and celebrity news, he says. Jason Mander, head of trends at GlobalWebIndex, agrees. “Twitter hasn’t been around for as long as Facebook and also has a younger age profile in terms of its active users, making it feel a little more relevant for some younger users,” he says.

Can Facebook be less annoying?

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To boost engagement, Facebook is polling users about the posts they find most irritating, MarketWatch's Quentin Fottrell reports on the News Hub. Photo: Getty Images.

Teenagers are fine with the limitations of the 140-character tweets because they’re used to conversing in a pithy, text-friendly manner, says Yalda T. Uhls, a senior researcher at the Children’s Digital Media Center at University of California, Los Angeles and regional director of Common Sense Media, a non-profit that helps children and families navigate the digital world. “A lot of kids are fascinated with celebrities and fame and the public nature of Twitter,” she says. “They feel like they have access to celebrities through Twitter. They can tweet to Beyoncé, and even if younger children may not understand that if there’s a tweet back it’s probably not Beyoncé doing the tweeting, it’s one of her team.”

There’s a downside to attention-seeking on Twitter. Earlier this month, a 14-year-old Dutch girl texted American Airlines a fake al Qaeda threat. When the airline tweeted back that they take all threats very seriously, she wrote, “Omfg I’m so stupid I’m scared.” But she also expressed delight when her account — now deleted — got thousands of new followers. The girl was arrested at her home in Rotterdam and later released. “It provided a teachable moment for parents,” Uhls says. But Twitter can help, too: a 2013 study by Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, used computer algorithms to find 37,717 troubling tweets related to suicide and bullying from 28,088 Twitter users with location information across 50 states.

Young people are critically important to social networks, Uhls says. They are impressionable when it comes to trying out new products, and “when you hook a young person into a social network, they’re more likely to develop a community and stay there,” she adds. Younger adults are more active on Twitter when it comes to consuming news: Nearly half (45%) of Twitter news consumers are 18-29 years old, according to a 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center, more than twice that of the overall population (21%); this significantly exceeds Facebook news consumers, where 34% are 18-29 years old. And, Pew found, much of what gets passed on to other Twitter followers is breaking news.

Teens also check their phones constantly. “It’s increasingly evident that teens are browsing more often via their mobile devices,” Piper Jaffray analysts Gene Munster and Douglas J. Clinton wrote in a recent survey, “Taking Stock With Teens.” That may have helped Twitter. It gets around 75% of its advertising revenue from mobile, while Facebook mobile ad revenue hovers at 59% (though it’s climbing rapidly). Of course, Facebook has now been around for a decade, which is why it has one of the oldest age profiles in terms of users, Mander says. Facebook towers over Twitter in terms of total users: the micro-blogging site is not yet profitable and has just over 240 million users (compared with 1.2 billion for Facebook).

Both Twitter and Facebook face competition from an army of popular apps. “The culture of broadcasting everything to everyone on social networks has long been weakening,” Mander says. Mobile messaging apps experienced rapid rises during 2013, led by picture-sharing app Snapchat (up 60%) and Kik Messenger (up 59%), according to GlobalWebIndex. Facebook is focusing on the next big app, spending $19 billion on WhatsApp, which recently hit 500 million users; before that, it paid $1 billion for photo-sharing site Instagram. A year-and-a-half ago, only 12% of teens chose Instagram as the most important social network, according to Piper Jaffray, but 30% choose it today. It concluded: “There will always be a new platform to compete for time spent on social.”

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